Saturday, June 9, 2007

Ubuntu and Thinkpad R60E trackpoint

When I made a fresh install of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my new Thinkpad R60E, the trackpoint worked out of the box, well almost.

I didn't have any interface to change the trackpoint sensitivity or speed. Trackpoint scrolling wasn't enabled by default. Moreover there wasn't any intuitive way to enable "trackpoint press to select" i.e. tapping the trackpoint would emulate a left click action.


Thanks to thinkwiki.org, most of my complaints were taken care of with the exception of one: enabling "trackpoing press to select". And that's the basic motivation for the post.

The good news is that you don't have to install any additional drivers. The drivers that Ubuntu provides takes care of everything.

For trackpoint scrolling you would need to make changes in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Details are listed here.

For changing speed and sensitivity, and enabling "press to select" the steps are pretty much the same as listed here. However in my case the path to the trackpoint settings was :

/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input:mouse2/device/

instead of

/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/

That's all there is to this post.

Oh btw, if it helps my Kernel version is 2.6.20

No comments: